"Well written, funny and wistful" - Paul Linford; "He is indeed the Lib Dem blogfather" - Stephen Tall"Jonathan Calder holds his end up well in the competitive world of the blogosphere" - New Statesman"A prominent Liberal Democrat blogger" - BBC Radio 4 Today programme"Charming and younger than I expected" - Wartime Housewife

Friday, December 24, 2004

This little Babe so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan's fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake,
Though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak, unarmed wise,
The gates of hell he will surprise.

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

If there is an award for the word of the year in 2004 it goes to "chav". There has been a lot of debate about its origins, but the most authoritative account comes in this article from Michael Quinion's site World Wide Words:

Chav is almost certainly from the Romany word for a child, chavi, recorded from the middle of the nineteenth century. We know it was being used as a term of address to an adult man a little later in the century, but it hasn’t often been recorded in print since and its derivative chav is quite new to most people.

Friday, December 17, 2004

There's only one question worth asking about work and pensions: "Chancellor, why in your first budget did you decide to take £8bn from pension funds every year?"

But Gordon Brown does not attend this question time. Let's avoid the cliché of saying that made Monday's session was Hamlet without the prince and call it Shrek without the ogre - not least because, as chief secretary to the treasury, that makes Paul Boateng the donkey.

In the green one's absence, we were offered a strange form of micro politics. We weren't just given the figures for individual constituencies that seem mandatory these days. (Coventry South 840 people have participated in the new deal for lone parents. And in Nottingham North there were 745 unemployed young people as at October 2004.)

No, we heard about individual people. So it was hello to Clare Robertson from Bulwell who, thanks to a variety of government schemes and subsidies, now has a job in administration. And hello to an unnamed lone parent who has gone through her work-focused interview, gained qualifications in literacy and numeracy, and found work as a receptionist.

Well done to both of them, but there is something odd going on. The last 25 years have seen the death of the idea that governments can manage the economy. Political parties used to solemnly debate whether they should aim for three or four or five per cent growth. Today, everyone agrees that Her Majesty's Ogre - sorry, that Gordon Brown's best act as chancellor has been to give up the power to set interest rates.

Yet there are no signs of government retreating from the world of work. In fact, it is entering it in more and more intimate ways. Unemployed people are now the subject of a vast therapeutic apparatus. One of the unknown receptionist's problems, said the minister Jane Kennedy, was that she lacked self-confidence, so the state moved in to cure her.

Listening to Labour ministers it's a wonder that anyone ever succeeded in getting a job before 1997. Where would the Industrial Revolution have been with their attitude? "I like this new 'steam engine' of yours, Mr Watt, but I doubt that any of our people will have the self-confidence to use it. Better stick to ploughing."

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

In 1966 Bobby Moore was voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year and Geoff Hurst finished third. Second place was occupied by a speedway rider.

Remember how popular show jumping was on television in the 1960s and 1970s? You rarely see it now.

Thirty years ago the British heavyweight boxing champion was just about the biggest name in sport - think of Henry Cooper. Can you name the current holder of the title without using Google? I can't.

All this should act as a warning to the cricket authorities who have just agreed to give the rights to broadcast test matches to BSkyB. For the sake of a mere 10 per cent increase in the revenue they have removed all live test cricket from terrestrial television. And even the terrestrial highlights programme will be on Five, which not everyone can receive. Crucially, reception in Market Harborough is poor.

The case against this decision is well made by John Grogan, the Labour MP for Selby, in the Guardian:

"I think it's disastrous for English cricket," said Mr Grogan. "Cricket doesn't enjoy such strong support as football, and there is a real danger that it will disappear from half the public's consciousness and youngsters will take up other sports.
"It is tragic that this should happen at a time when the England cricket team is performing so well. The England cricket board has ignored the advice of numerous former England players and captains.
"They have done this for short term gain, but what they gain in TV money they may stand to lose in sponsorship in the long term."

The article also quotes the Liberal Democrats' own Sue Doughty, who:

said it was "absolutely essential" that the government looked once again at the issue of listed events.
"This affects people who value sport on TV most," she said. "I am thinking of older people who have been cricket supporters all their lives, and who can ill-afford the extra cost of Sky. If you have a pension then you don't want to be spending a large chunk of it on Sky."

Yes, there is a case for saving the cricket authorities from the consequences of their own stupidity, but it would be far better if they were not so stupid in the first place.
Market mechanisms are fine when the outcome does not matter. If everyone stops drinking Coca Cola and drinks Pepsi instead then no one need worry. But you would expect the cricket authorities at least to be concerned at the prospect of people giving up cricket and taking up other sports instead. So they have to have some concern for the long-term health of the game as well as for short-term income.
They should also remember that show jumping lost its popularity when people stopped calling horses things like Penwood Forge Mill and started calling them Sanyo Music Centre instead.
Money isn't everything, as the cricket authorities may soon be reminded.

Any comment on David Blunkett has to begin with a tribute to him for not allowing blindness to prevent him following a major career in politics. And the fight he had to put up to get a proper education probably explains some of the cheerlessness in his approach.

Nevertheless, I cannot pretend to be sorry that he has resigned. His presence as home secretary was central to a discreditable Labour campaign strategy that involves a populist attack on civil liberties. This attack is largely designed to lure the Liberal Democrats into opposing it in the belief (mistaken, I argued yesterday) that this will cost us votes.

All that can be said in Blunkett's defence is that unlike many of his colleagues he is not cynical. With his background in South Yorkshire Labour politics he really believes in curbing people's liberties.

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

There is a thoughtful posting in the uk.politics.electoral newsgroup occasioned by this article in the Birmingham Post where Peter Hain reveals his fear that "disillusioned Labour voters could hand 11 Midland seats to the Conservatives by defecting to the Liberal Democrats".

The newsgroup poster "hotelier" writes:

I think Peter Hain is correct to be worried about natural Labour supporters voting Lib Dem. I may be one myself. But it seems to me that Labour are going about enticing us back in exactly the wrong way. They portray the Lib Dems as soft on crime in that civil liberties are important to them.

The trouble is we know that and agree with that analysis. That's why we're considering voting for them.

It may well be that those holding liberal views on crime and civil liberties are in a minority in Britain. But it is a sizeable minority and it includes many people who did not vote Liberal Democrat at the last election. If Labour wants to push them towards us we should thank our good fortune.

It does reinforce the impression that the Lib Dems are remarkably fortunate in the tactics their opponents are using. Not only are the Conservatives obsessed with Ukip and happy to ignore the voters they are losing to us, they have now gifted us the status of being the only party which is opposed to compulsory identity cards.

At the next election this will be a high-profile and easily understood issue. It may be a minority concern but, as "hotelier" argues, it is an issue that will appeal to precisely those people - disillusioned liberal Blair supporters - whose votes we are trying to attract.

Monday, December 13, 2004

UKIP is to oppose the notoriously anti-EU Tory MP Bill Cash at the next general election. Their deputy leader Mike Nattrass, a West Midlands MEP, has been chosen to fight Mr Cash's Stone seat.

Nattrass says of the Staffordshire MP:

So far, Mr Cash has been posing as a eurosceptic. Does he believe in the sovereignty of Parliament and the self-determination of the British electorate in all matters or does he believe that powers should be ceded to the EU?

If he believes in the former he should sign a UKIP membership application form immediately and fight the seat as a UKIP candidate.

Trivial fact: William Cash's political career has been aided by the family nametape fortune.

An astonishing behind-the-scenes row between the National Assembly's Presiding Officer and a prominent Labour AM culminated in an incident where the AM is said to have told the Presiding Officer to "**** off" in a Cardiff restaurant.

Relations between Plaid Cymru peer Lord Elis-Thomas and Rhondda AM Leighton Andrews have been under severe strain since the Assembly's Queen's Speech plenary debate on December 1.

Peter also reports that Leighton Andrews is setting up his own blog. I wonder if it will have a comments section?

Sunday, December 12, 2004

While I am it, here is a book review from the same issue. I shall add it my other Liberal Democrat Newsreviews on Lord Bonkers' site in due course.

The Curious Incident of the WMD in IraqRohan Candappa
Profile Books, 2004, £5.99

During their first brush with fame in the 1960s John Bird and John Fortune would entertain audiences at Peter Cook’s Establishment Club by simply reading out official documents. As their present-day collaborator Rory Bremner says, such publications are often funnier than anything a scriptwriter can produce.

Rowan Candappa also appreciates the comic possibilities of a deadpan account of real events. He describes Tony Blair’s career, emphasising the run up to the conflict in Iraq. His model is Mark Haddon’s bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which is narrated by a 15-year-old autistic boy. The clever thing about Haddon’s book is that its style, which reflects the hero’s difficulty understanding human emotion, is nevertheless extremely moving.

Candappa is no Haddon, and his Anthony Algernon St Michael Blair owes much to Adrian Mole and the secret diary of John Major that Private Eye used to run. I am sure it was their Major who first owned a Letts Prime Minister’s Diary. But The Curious Incident of the WMD in Iraq is consistently amusing and the product of thorough research.

We first meet Blair at Fettes College, which was “Just like Harry Potter. Except that back then I couldn’t do magic”. A profound thinker – he stresses his belief in “The People’s God” – he gravitated to politics. He recalls that as an aspiring Labour candidate “it was very important to wear the right badges. My best badge was a CND badge. I used to wear it all the time.”

Once at Westminster the young Blair set about reforming the party with his friends Peter and Gordon. (“This was not the 1960s singing duo Peter and Gordon as I first thought.”) He soon became leader, changing its name to “New Labour” after toying with “I Can’t Believe We’re Not Tories”.

As prime minister he preferred to leave domestic affairs to Gordon. Abroad, it was easier to know “The Right Thing To Do”. So after 9/11 he was happy to help George W. Bush defeat the “Dangerous and Uncontrollable Rogue State of Afghanistan and its Evil Taliban masters by doing Bombing Back To The Middle Ages”.

They then turned to Iraq, but “George must have been really busy at this point because he didn’t have time to ring me and get me involved in any of this planning and decision making”. The invasion took place even so and we are still living with the consequences.

Mark Haddon’s narrator concludes by announcing his ambition to take a first class honours degree and become a scientist. Anthony Algernon St Michael Blair’s career may not end so happily.

Here is Friday's column from Liberal Democrat News. Not funny, but I think it is true. It's an issue I have been thinking about for a while, but I was influenced by this article from the Trash City site.

Copyright

In politics things are often the opposite of what they appear. Take Monday, when the Labour MP John Robertson asked Estelle Morris what she was doing to promote music among young people.

You would naturally have assumed he wanted them to have more of it. That was certainly what Morris thought he meant. So she boasted of the government’s music manifesto and its aim of providing every young person with access to musical experiences.

But that was not what Robertson had in mind. For he then asked if Morris agreed we should be educating young people about the value of the creativity involved in making music. It’s not clear that those words mean anything, but she did agree.

It turned out that Robertson wanted the government to endorse the music industry’s "Respect the Value of Music" campaign. This is intended to discourage young people from downloading music from the internet.

So what Robertson really wanted was for young to have less access to music. And Morris obliged: “We must make sure that everybody uses and accesses music in a way that protects the copyright of those who write it.”

Yes, the music industry is in a state of flux, busy seeking a business model that will enable it to exploit the net. But every technological advance produces winners and losers. Some exisiting companies thrive, others are elbowed aside and eventually a new order settles down.

And every technological advance is treated as a threat to performing artists. (Music companies only care about artists, of course; they never think of their profits.) Once, home taping was supposed to be killing music. In reality, it encouraged people to listen to music and they ended up buying more records. Then the film companies tried to have home video recorders banned. Fortunately for them they failed, and cinemas have been booming ever since. It is hard to see why, in the long run, the availability of music over the net should be any different.

By endorsing the "Respect the Value of Music" campaign Estelle Morris is siding with the industry’s losers. Government certainly has a role in the arts, but it’s hard to see why protecting unsuccessful multinational companies by limiting the access that young people have to music should form part of it.

Thursday, December 09, 2004

It seems I was wrong and Santas do require constant surveillance. The Shropshire Star (of course) reports:

Fun runners dressed as Father Christmas were involved in a drunken brawl after the end of Newtown's famous charity run, police revealed today.
Officers had to draw batons and use CS gas to quell the behaviour of a crowd of yobs in the town centre on Sunday night. Some were still wearing their Santa costumes.

It's a sign of the times that the use of CS gas by the police in such circumstances is now treated as commonplace.

Still a big hello to the appropriately named PC Slaymaker, who is quoted in the article.

So far the greatest achievement of the environmental movement, I have often argued, is to make us all terrified of the natural world. By emphasising the number and urgency of the threats we face, the greens risk turning the environment into a malign force that is out to get us.

I thought I was pretty much alone in this view, but I recently came across a passage from the late great Christopher Lasch saying much the same thing. I shall post it to Serendib in a day or two.

Anyway, given my view of the greens, I was delighted to see this piece in the Guardian. It is written by one of the most prominent Greens, George Monbiot, and positively revels in the richness and strangeness of the natural world:

I want to live in a land in which wolves might prowl. A land in which, as I have done in eastern Poland, I can follow a bend in a forest path and come face to face with a bison. In which, as I have done in the Pyrenees, I can stumble across a pair of wild boar sleeping under a bush. I am prepared to exchange a small risk to my life for the thrill of encountering that which lies beyond it. This is a romantic proposition, I admit. But is it not also a rational one?

Gratuitous plug: There are more nice quotations about nature in this article of mine from Openmind.

Most of the people who are rooting for David Blunkett to keep his job are doing so on the basis that we should maintain a strict divide between politicians' public and private lives. If the people who are using this argument really believe it, then they do not understand how politics works.

To the simple-minded politics is an easy business: you agree a programme for government, you put it to the people in the form of a manifesto, you are elected and you implement that programme. This is the view of politics that Tony Benn and his far-left supporters held in the 1980s. It is the view that the Conservatives, with their promises of doing 101 impossible things on their first day in office, hold today.

Meanwhile in the real world, government is about precisely that - governing. Politicians frequently come to power relatively unencumbered with specific policy proposals. Mrs Thatcher did in 1979: Tony Blair did in 1997. It may even be that not having too many policies is one of the defining factors of a successful political party.

And however many or few policy commitment they have, governments soon find their plans overtaken by events. They have to react to developments that neither they nor the electorate has foreseen. No manifesto will tell them how those developments should be tackled.

So what matters most in office is the character and judgement of ministers. Given that, it seems to me entirely reasonable for us to take David Blunkett's conduct of his private life into account when we are arguing about whether he should be home secretary or not.

We may disagree about the rights and wrongs of what deserves to be called Nannygate. And we certainly do not know everything that has gone on or if both sides are being entirely truthful. But it seems to me that only those who take a willfully naive view of politics can argue that it is none of our business.

Yet early in the article there was a quotation from "Linda Taaffe, the deputy secretary of Waltham Forest NUT, who helped mastermind the campaign," which makes it legitimate to ask whether this campaign was being fought in the interests of parents and children or of teachers. There is a tendency among many Labour and Liberal Democrat activists to assume that whatever is good for teachers - and the teachers' unions in particular - must be good for everyone else involved in education. Unfortunately the world is not such a simple place as that.

The same people often give the impression that they believe secondary education reached its perfect form some time in the 1970s and that any failings today result from the unaccountable wickedness of governments in failing to give enough money to comprehensive schools. The result is that they are endlessly negative. The National Union of Teachers have opposed every proposed education reform - good, bad or lunatic - for 30 years.

The result is that no one takes any notice of the teachers' unions any more, and the many government plans that do need to be opposed go through more easily.

Friday, December 03, 2004

Father Christmas has been given a new companion in his grotto at a Welsh shopping centre: as well as his elves, an unobtrusive webcam will monitor the jollifications of the next four weeks.

And children queuing for presents in Llanelli will be discouraged from the traditional, brief perch on Santa's lap while they whisper to him what it is they want in their stockings.

The report by Martin Wainwright goes on say that the grotto at St Elli's shopping centre has been "modernised on Neighbourhood Watch lines to give visitors a clear view of the inside". It also says that "Children will find Santa on a double bench with a space beside him which he will tap to steer them away from his lap."

Will all this make parents feel less concerned about their children? Of course it won't: it will just confirm their darkest fears. If you pander to concerns that are not well founded you do not dispel them, you reinforce them.

I am sorry to plug Frank Furedi again, but his discussion of the breakdown of what he calls "adult solidarity" in Paranoid Parenting is the best explanation, or at least characterisation, of what is going on here. Other adults used to be seen as allies in raising our children: today they are seen as a threat.

Which explains events like those in Yeovil yesterday where, The Timesreports (you may need to register):

Police have been accused of heavy handedness after arresting two young boys who were playing with toy guns. One of the boys was held in a cell for five hours.

Liam Spencer, 11, and his friend, Luke Johnson, 13, were singing the James Bond theme tune as they rolled around on the floor at a youth club “shooting” at each other in a mock fight.

Liam, who is 4ft 8in, was dressed as Santa Claus and Luke was wearing a Frankenstein’s Monster mask.

But as the pair walked home, a motorist who saw them carrying their silver-coloured plastic guns called the police.

Personally, I would be pleased to see boys that age doing something as old-fashioned as playing with toy guns, but the police is full of sententious comment from the police about taking such matters seriously. Surely the problem here lies with the motorist, who is apparently unable to distinguish between children playing and desperate criminals? This police response to her complaint is not going to encourage her to form more sensible views.

This just in: The Poundland store in Yeovil has banned the sale of toy guns. The manager Kevin Withers said he would now "err on the side of caution".

The BBC reports that Ukraine's Supreme Court has annulled the second round of the presidential election, upholding opposition claims that it was fraudulent.

Meanwhile, there was a particularly good article in the Guardian yesterday by Timothy Garton Ash which looked at the ingenious reasons Western liberals have found for not supporting a liberal revolution in Kiev.

Sometimes when I am paying for something by Switch and the confirmation takes a while to come through, I get the image of a dour Scotsman running his finger down the column of my spending and tutting. I now know who he is. He is Gordon Brown.

Because under him, the Treasury has colonised whole chunks of our national life. Pensions, health, education and transport have all fallen to it. Even affluent families find themselves caught in the net of his tax credits. You sense Brown would like the Treasury to have the final say on every spending decision – every holiday abroad or new pair of school shoes.

He has come a long way from the young firebrand who edited the Red Paper on Scotland in 1975. Then he wrote that “Eroding the power of the market is the forging ground for socialist progress” and went on to call for the nationalisation of just about every industry without compensation. He was particularly exercised by the plight of linoleum workers in Kirkcaldy, but the fact that their problem was that no one wanted to buy linoleum any more passed him by.

Yet in many ways the striking thing about Gordon Brown is how little he has changed. Through everything, his seriousness and belief in his own importance– what Andrew Roth has called his “mixture of Presbyterian doom and self-satisfied righteousness” – have remained undiminished.

So too has his wish to be prime minister. We know that Tony Blair is not keen on the idea, but none of the alternative candidates looks likely to last the pace. David Blunkett, by a particularly pleasing irony, has problems with nannies and every day reveals more of the unbearable lightness of Alan Milburn.

So if Labour does win the next general election it is overwhelmingly likely that we shall see Gordon Brown as prime minister. To some. a more overtly Labour administration is an appealing prospect, just as many Liberals started to see the virtues of old-fashioned, aristocratic Toryism after years of Mrs Thatcher.

But beware. Brown is a puritan, and when he talks about favouring “hard-working families” he means it. There is an essential cheerlessness about him – and about old Labour in general – that should remind us all why we joined the Liberal Democrats in the first place.

Leanne Wood, a Plaid Cymru AM, has become the first member to be ordered out of the chamber of the Welsh Assembly after referring to the Queen as "Mrs Windsor", reports the BBC.

This is not an incident we would normally take much notice of, except to remark that those who told us that devolution would lead to a new style of politics appear to be wrong. On this evidence, Cardiff is just as stuffy as Westminster.

But one thing here is remarkable: the identity of the AM who shopped Wood to the presiding officer Dafyd Elis-Thomas. Or, as I had better call him (he appears to be touchy about such things), Lord Elis-Thomas.

That AM was Leighton Andrews, Labour member for the Rhondda. In a useful post, our own AM Peter Black quotes him as saying:

I regret having to raise the issue but, during the course of the previous debate, Leanne Wood referred to the Queen as ‘Mrs Windsor’. Will you take advice as to whether this is in order? I am sure that in a week when the Queen has been in Cardiff to open the Wales Millennium Centre, my constituents, and others, will consider the remark to be childish and offensive.

I suspect the people of the Rhondda may have more important things to worry about, but Andrews' career is worth a little comment.

He was a prominent Liberal activist for many years. Indeed, he spoke at the first national Liberal event I ever attended - the Union of Liberal Students annual conference at Leeds in (I think) 1979. As a Liberal member of the NUS Executive - a very rare breed in those days - he was accorded an almost godlike status. In 1987 he was an energetic Liberal Alliance candidate in Gillingham.

Andrews eventually resurfaced in the Labour Party, winning Rhondda back from Plaid Cymru last year. Michael Meadowcroft described him as moving "from Liberal thinker to cheerleader for Blair's authoritarians". (There is a news report about Michael's comments here, and you can find a .pdf file of the relevant issue of Liberator here.) Having observed the way Andrews dobbed Leanne Wood in, you can see what he was getting at.

I would not go so far as those who claim to have known Andrews before he was Welsh, but it is fair to say that his Celtic heritage was not the most obvious thing about him in his Gillingham days. Peter Black once observed that "Leighton used to write columns in Liberal News extolling the virtues of Gillingham Town. He now claims to be an avid Cardiff City fan."

Newspapers operate to a strict annual timetable. A couple of months after stories about schools banning children from playing conkers come stories about councils banning parents from filming their children's nativity plays.

Someone on the uk.politics.censorship newsgroup has sighted the first one of the year:

Parents in West Dunbartonshire could be banned from photographing and videoing their own children at school nativity plays this Christmas.

The council last week imposed the policy in a bid to prevent pictures falling into the hands of paedophiles.

But outraged opponents have described the move as "political correctness gone mad".

She is right, of course. There may well be a case for banning photography at these plays because people taking pictures get in the way of other audience members and do not enjoy the event properly themselves because they are too busy looking through a lens. But the reason given is dangerous nonsense because it plays to tabloid fears of a universal paedophile conspiracy.

It also underlines the paradox that years of public concern about child pornography has had the effect of making us see any image of a child as sexualised. As Frank Furedi says in Culture of Fear, Western art has traditionally seen images of naked children as symbolic of beauty and innocence. Today, not only are these images beyond the pale: we believe that pictures of children taking part in sports days or swathed in dressing gowns and tea towels in nativity plays are too sexual to be allowed to exist.

Worth noting in the original report is the fact that the Labour councillor who is quoted as defending the ban appeals to "data protection" in support of her case. This concept may soon come to rival "health and safety" as an all-purpose reason for stopping other people doing things.

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

The most imaginative way of fighting back against surveillance society comes from America. Click here for the website of the Surveillance Camera Players:

We're the Surveillance Camera Players, a group formed in New York City in November 1996. We protest against the use of surveillance cameras in public places because the cameras violate our constitutionally protected right to privacy. We manifest our opposition by performing specially adapted plays directly in front of these cameras. We use our visibility - our public appearances, our interviews with the media and our website - to explode the cynical myth that only those who are "guilty of something" are opposed to being surveilled by unknown eyes.

Labour Watch claims "increasing evidence suggesting US troops used napalm in the battle of Fallujah" without giving any links to that evidence. The most authoritative account appears to be this one from Aljazeera and there was also one in the last Sunday Mirror.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

You may need to register to read this, but it is free and well worth doing.

Sunday, November 28, 2004

In a recent post on a column by Polly Toynbee I suggested that a tendency to treat adults like children and children like adults is typical of modern life in general and New Labour in particular. Two more examples have come my way in recent days.

The first comes from Margaret Hodge's defence of the nanny state as reported in Saturday's Guardian. According to that article, Hodge said:

critics of the nanny state misunderstood the role of nannies. "Good nannies don't just tell you what you can't do ... [or] must do. They are about ensuring that you can make real and informed choices for yourself."

Again there is no sense here that children need nannies but adults do not. It is hard to escape the conclusion that, to New Labour, we are all children and all in need of nannies - albeit enlightened New Labour nannies who do not rely on the back of the hairbrush to get their way. In direct contradiction of what she says, Hodge's meaning is clearly that adults are not competent to make choices for themselves.

The second example comes from the Spiked website and an article discussing attempts to foster media literacy in children. Its author Sandy Starr describes a session run by James Park, director of Antidote, the campaign for emotional literacy, and Barry Richards, professor of public communication at Bournemouth University. In it, those taking part were shown:

a video recording of six-year-old pupils in east London discussing the question 'Is Africa a free country?' (itself a politically illiterate question since Africa is a continent, but that was apparently part of the point of the exercise). The children's emotionally literate teacher sat with them in a circle, inviting them to contrast and reflect on the differing accounts of Africa in a picture book they had just read, in items they had seen on the news, and that they had received from members of their family.

Starr comments that:

While this might be a useful exercise for getting children to think about the world, how it constituted an emotional education escaped me. But what was disturbing was Richards' assertion that the video demonstrated a valid model for fostering political understanding in general. Here we see the infantilisation of the public that lies at the heart of projects to promote new forms of literacy.

Starr's "infantilisation" is the right word to describe what is going on here and in the views expressed by Polly Toynbee and Margaret Hodge. In Starr's example, however, the reverse process is taking place - we are demanding that children as young as six have an opinion on African politics and develop a sophisticated ability to weigh evidence. An ability which, incidentally, relegates what they learn from their parents to being just one more source of information.

This tells us a great deal about what enlightened opinion expects children to be like, but it is hard to see that the children themselves are gaining much from it. And it reinforces my belief that our infantilisation of adults goes hand in hand with a demand that children become more like adults.

Thanks to the useful Labour Watch site for bringing this to our attention. The Labour Party's own website announces that:

One of the public’s top priorities – tackling the linked problems of crime, terrorism, illegal immigration, drugs and anti-social behaviour - is central to the Labour Government’s aims.

Linked problems? The concept of "anti-social behaviour" has always been a remarkably elastic one. It seems to cover everything from serious criminality to low-level nuisance from children that in a sane society would be settled without any thought of involving public authorities. Now it seems in danger of expanding even further and embracing terrorism too.

Friday, November 26, 2004

It’s the Queen I feel sorry for. She dresses in full fig: crown, white gloves and reading glasses. She rounds up her retinue: not just men in tights, but boys in tights and ladies in waiting too. She rides to Westminster.

And all she is given to recite are gobbets of Blairspeak like “a modern and comprehensive framework” and “more security and opportunity for all”.

She should have brought the Internet Trawler Pursuivant, in doublet, hose and buckled shoes, to slip her the script of the BBC’s The Power of Nightmares. It would have made far more informative reading.

Then she could have said that politicians:

have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand.

Or:

American neoconservatives, and the radical Islamists … created today’s nightmare vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens the world. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.

The speech she was given to read confirmed this analysis. We are promised a happier approach from Gordon Brown next week. Though the chancellor’s career confirms P. G. Wodehouse’s observation that it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

But this week the government is dealing in nightmares. Since it came to power there have been 27 criminal justice acts. We have more police officers and crime is falling. But Labour pretends to believe the times are darker than ever, so the Queen had to tell us all about terrorism, crime, anti-social behaviour and ID cards.

The inevitable ID cards. Every time you hear a minister calling for them it is for a different reason. Illegal working. Identity theft. Benefit fraud. International terrorism. Whatever the issue, cards are the answer. They sound more and more like a solution looking for a problem.

Matthew Taylor said on Tuesday: “The Government is focusing on fear, whereas the Liberal Democrats offer hope.” I’m not sure you can use “whereas” in a sound bite, but he is right.

Thursday, November 25, 2004

I was reading a profile Alex Salmond in The House Magazine earlier today. It is the Westminster in-house magazine and has a very good website, except that the article I am reading seems to be the only one for the 15 November issue that is not on line.

These profiles are always written in the subject's own words, and this one quotes Salmond as saying:

I get on well with unionists and, indeed, you find nationalists from Northern Ireland get on with unionists. Actually, Irish members in Westminster and in Europe have tended to co-operate very well on social and economic matters. There are actually far more divisions between the Ulster Unionists and the Democratic Unionists because they are fighting for the same votes - making their relationship that much more fratricidal. They are chasing the same customers, rather like the SNP and Scottish Labour. So I don't have too many friends in the Scottish Labour Party - I have one or two but I better not say who they are for their own sakes. But I have got a lot of Labour friends among MPs south of the border.

Salmond is right. His observation explains why it is that West Country Liberal Democrats are at the Tories' throats yet strike the rest of their party as rather right-wing and why the Lib Dems who hate Labour the most are radicals from Northern cities.

When I read this I was also reminded of a fringe meeting on Lib-Lab relations held at the Liberal Democrat a few years ago. Among those on the panel were Menzies Campbell and Jackie Ballard. I was struck at the time how odd it was that it was the patrician Edinburgh lawyer who was keen on getting closer to the Labour Party and the former lecturer and social worker who was hostile to the idea.

Here the rivalry was not so much for votes as for ideas, but Salmond's theory still holds true. Ming, coming from the Whig side of the party, felt no pressure to present himself as a political radical and in particular was not concerned with competing for that title with Labour. He was therefore open to the idea of closer relations with them because he was not fighting with them to occupy the same ideological niche.

Jackie did feel an obligation to wrest the right to call herself radical away from Labour, and was therefore more hostile to that party. So she argued against deals and pacts with them even though, on any objective assessment, her political views were closer to Labour than Ming's were.

The pro-market campaign group Reform has details of an encouraging opinion poll on its homepage:

Asked in general about “legislation on things like hunting, smoking and parents’ ability to smack their children”, 71 per cent of voters agreed that “Too many infringements on personal liberty are being proposed on matters that should be for individuals to decide for themselves”, while only 27 per cent agreed that “The Government should legislate on such things even if they mean restrictions on personal liberty.”

You can download a .pdf file giving the full figures from the same page.

Reform's regular e-mailing breaks down the figures by party. The libertarian view was supported by 82 per cent of Conservative voters, 66 per cent of Lib Dem voters and 62 per cent of Labour voters.

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

I wish to see Tony Blair impeached and required to answer in the Court of Parliament that he repeatedly and substantively misled the people into the Iraq War of 2003 while choosing to remain in office when he is in clear violation of the traditional convention of ministerial resignation.

If this is how you feel then this website allows you to sign a petition in support of the parliamentary moves to bring Blair up before the beak.

The Skakagrall reports that this website was taken down yesterday by its previous hosting company and the database of supporting signatures deleted.

Meanwhile, Charles Kennedy (may he live for ever) is introducing the following amendment to the Queen's Speech:

… but regrets that the Gracious Speech contains no commitment to introduce legislation to clarify the responsibility of the Prime Minister to Parliament, particularly in relation to the prerogative powers and the role of Parliament in matters of war and peace, and calls for a special Select Committee of the House to consider these matters.

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

I normally rely upon the Shropshire Star for light relief. Today it carries an intriguing story that has not made the radio news bulletins:

Shropshire hunt protester Otis Ferry has had guns and other property seized by police after a raid on his home, it emerged today. Officers took away the legally-held guns, a computer and other items after an extensive search of the 21-year-old's house on the outskirts of Shrewsbury.

And:

it is believed police carried out the search because of concerns over Mr Ferry's behaviour during hunt protests. He has said he will continue a campaign of peaceful protest against the hunting ban.

Imagine the fuss in some quarters if Ferry had been planning to take up a more fashionable cause.

What's this? An article that shares my analysis of government family policy? And in the Guardian too:

After 20 years of the state in retreat, abdicating power and responsibility over the circumstances of people's lives in places such as Sunderland, now it's on the advance again. The state is carving out new territory where it will exert its authority and attempt to reshape society - penetrating deep into one of the hitherto most private aspects of people's lives: how to parent.

Writing in the Guardian today, Martin Wainwright reports that moves to bring back park keepers are gathering pace.

Further exploration reveals this press release from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. It quotes one of the organisation's bigwigs as saying:

"There is a temptation to believe that CCTV and tough security is the only way to tackle these problems. However, many of the park managers here today would tell you that it is possible to tackle problems like vandalism and graffiti and achieve long-term cost savings by investing above all in staffing, maintenance and good design."

Amen to that. The rise of CCTV cameras has gone hand-in-hand with the depopulation of the public world. All the semi-official figures who used to people it, such as bus conductors and park keepers, have been removed. (The left thought they were crypto-fascists, the right thought they cost too much.)

The result has been to leave people feeling less secure. When politicians call for "more bobbies on the beat" they would do better to support schemes like this one and employ more park keepers.

As I write, the Lords and the Commons are fighting over the hunting bill like two greyhounds with a hare. It looks as though their lordships are going to force the prime minister to ban hunting at once so the resulting row takes place in the run up to the general election.

Forget all the guff about the upper house being the repository of the nation’s wisdom: this is a brilliant piece of low politics. And, whatever your views on hunting, Blair deserves it for his dithering and duplicity.

For Tony Blair never wanted to ban fox hunting. He wanted to be always in the process of banning it. That way, whenever his backbenches threatened to rebel over some nasty right-wing policy, he could buy them off with a little more progress on blood sports.

Not that most Labour MPs who vote to ban hunting are particularly concerned about animal welfare. You don’t find them putting down questions about factory farming. What they really want to do is have a go at the toffs. They would be just as happy banning polo or the Henley Regatta.

But when politicians insist on fighting the class war the outcome is seldom happy. We saw this during the miners strike and also when the Tories brought in the poll tax. In the long run, outbreaks of public disorder rarely do governments much good.

What will become of the foxes in all this? If hunting is banned, they will still be killed and the methods used may well be no more humane than hunting.

Worse than that, they will learn that under New Labour nothing comes without strings. Expect to see the introduction of compulsory lectures for foxes on the rights of chickens – or “members of the egg-laying community”, as they will probably be called. Look too for a network of Cubs Clubs run by Margaret Hodge and a Brush Your Brush campaign headed by John Reid.

All this may accelerate the trend that has seen foxes abandon the countryside to become urban scavengers and, as many householders know, significant pests. It will be a sad day when the only foxes you see are sitting round shopping malls wearing Burberry baseball caps and giving their children Sunny D.

As had been the case throughout his nursery education, Charles continued to find it difficult to concentrate on one subject for very long. He continued to struggle with mathematics, the principals (sic.) of which had eluded him from a young age, and excelled only at art and reading.

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Let's analyse the opening paragraph of Polly Toynbee's column in the Guardian today:

The nanny state is the good state. A nanny is what every well-off family hires if it can afford it. So why do the nanny-employing Tories use the word as an insult? In the Commons and in their press, they bray like a bunch of prep-school bullies calling anyone a cissy if they do what nanny says.

There is a simple fact that Toynbee seems to have overlooked. Well-off families hire nannies if they have young children: parents do not hire nannies because they want to be looked after themselves. (Apart from Wendy Craig in the Hammer film The Nanny, that is, and it is not a happy precedent.)

It is because she ignores this that Toynbee finds herself putting forward the nonsensical argument that Tory MPs are behaving like children ("prep-school bullies") because they want to be treated like adults.

It would be easy to say that someone who cannot grasp the difference between an adult and a child should not be writing for a national newspaper. But increasingly society as a whole is having trouble holding that distinction in mind.

We should not be so surprised if a society that increasingly treats children as adults begins to show signs of treating adults as children.

A good day for those who complain that no one ever resigns these days. Doug Smith has resigned as head of the Child Support Agency and Jonathan Ford has resigned as head of the National Assessment Agency.

Both agencies were created by central government to take on responsibility for matters that have traditionally been the concern of autonomous institutions - the courts and schools respectively - and both have failed.

Whatever the faults of the individuals involved, it is hard to believe that this is entirely a coincidence. The socialist belief that progress consists in more and more aspects of society being taken over by the state has influenced many Liberals, but it is time that it was challenged more consistently.

The question is not just whether it is desirable for the state to run so many things: it is whether it is possible for it do so with any reasonable degree of efficiency.

Monday, November 15, 2004

On Remembrance Sunday ... as Britain commemorated its war dead and in particular those who died fighting Nazi tyranny, the Home Secretary David Blunkett moved Britain closer to the dictatorship of the majority.

and

In the interview he put everything that is bad down to individualism and claimed human rights as "community" rights.

Everyone knows what individual or human rights mean. They are rights for individual and humans. Individuals make up the community or society. But what are "community" rights? In fact, what is the community?

It can be whatever the politicians or a vocal majority want it to be. The community can be created out of myth and have emotional resonance that bears little connection with reason. Establish "community" rights and then whoever questions the "community" or challenges it can be said to be denying those rights. They can then be dealt with by government.

I won't say a word against Simon, but I am increasingly aware that what I value is not so much individualism as individuality - the flourishing of different sorts of people and different ways of life. (I believe I came across this distinction in Michael Ignatieff's biography of Isaiah Berlin. It is a useful one.)

It is a concept that has something to do with the old schoolmaster's ideal of "character" and I suspect that the development of individuality requires strong institutions, such as schools that are not under central control. Teenage culture does suggest that individualism does not always produce individuality; and it is undeniable that one of the clearest ways we choose to express our individuality is through he groups we decide to join.

Simon suggests that Blunkett is in danger of shifting Britain towards Nazism, but the problem with our home secretary is that he is a socialist. He cut his teeth in South Yorkshire Labour politics in an era when many in those circles looked to Eastern Europe for at least some of their inspiration.

As a socialist Blunkett does not believe in individualism, and he does not believe in individuality either. For him there is one right way to live, and that way must be imposed on society.

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Further inspection of the Boriswatch site reveals that his full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

It also reveals the following extraordinary claim:

Boris's bell has tolled in the political world, but he'll be back, doing so effortlessly what he has done in the past - transcending the class barriers and talking to the public in a language we all understand.

Nonsense. The basis of Boris Johnson's appeal is that he transcends the class barriers by talking to the public in a language no one can understand.

I am reminded of a story about Richard Crossman, the fiercely intellectual Labour minister from the 1960s who sat for a very working class seat. Someone once asked "Whatever do they make of Dick Crossman on the council estates in Coventry?"

The reply was: Oh, they don't understand a word he says, but they think he is wonderful."

Liberal Democrat Youth & Students (LDYS) has come out against a total ban on smoking in public places.

I don't know how people who work for tobacco companies sleep at night, and I increasingly look for restaurants which don't allow smoking. Nevertheless, I think LDYS is right.

And I am absolutely certain that it is an immensely encouraging sign to see the party's youth wing coming up with a policy that is uncompromisingly Liberal and which may annoy Guardian leader writers. More power to them.

Friday, November 12, 2004

The Chagos archipelago lies in the Indian Ocean, 1000 miles south of Cape Comorin. Horley is a town in Surrey, now rather dominated by Gatwick Airport.

They were brought together twice last week. On Wednesday in Westminster Hall and again the following day in a Commons adjournment debate. To understand why, you need to know a bit of history.

Until 1965 the Chagos Islands belonged to Mauritius. They had been inhabited since the eighteenth century by the descendants of African slaves and Indian plantation workers. People lived a self-sufficient life as fishermen and farmers in a landscape of rich vegetation and soaring palms.

But the Americans wanted a military base in the Indian Ocean and chose Diego Garcia, the largest of the Chagos Islands. So the group was hived off when Mauritius won independence and Diego Garcia leased to the US.

The Americans also wanted the islands cleared. Obligingly, Harold Wilson’s government invented the fiction that the islanders were merely itinerant workers and expelled them all. Their animals were slaughtered and they were shipped off to be dumped at the quayside in Mauritius.

In 2000 the High Court in London ruled that the government had acted unlawfully and that the Chagos islanders should be allowed to return. "It is clear from some of the disclosed documents that … the official zeal in implementing those removal policies went beyond any proper limits."

But this year the British government issued two Orders in Council overturning that judgement.

I didn’t know they could do that either. Isn’t the British constitution wonderful?

Then the islanders began to arrive at Gatwick. They have the right to settle here, but few resources, and councils have no duty to house them. For a while those islanders camped at the airport, but eventually some authorities took pity and found them temporary accommodation. Which is where Horley comes into the story.

Local Tory MPs have taken up the case – perhaps because refugees who want to go home are the kind they like best. But it is legitimate to ask why local councils should foot the bill for government duplicity.

And the whole sad story reminds us that there are no depths to which a Labour prime minister will not descend in his eagerness to suck up to the Americans.

A Shropshire apple expert who discovered an "extinct" apple at a Shropshire food fair today said he hoped more juicy finds could be made in the county.

The campaign group Common Ground had done much to raise awareness of the loss of traditional apple varieties. Its website reprints a good article on the subject from the Financial Times by Philippa Davenport:

I rejoice above all in the re-emergence of respect for locality, by which I mean local apples grown and consumed in their home territory. It is not just the ethics of food miles and supporting local economy that concerns me. Growing local varieties keeps biodiversity live, and eating local varieties means enjoying them at their best.

I want an end to latch key kids as we move from the traditional welfare state to an opportunity society that helps families with the daily problems they face. I can announce today that over the next Parliament, every parent with children in primary school will be offered the guarantee of affordable school based childcare from 8 to 6, from breakfast clubs in the morning to after school clubs in the evening - and not just during term time but all the year round.

Leaving aside the meaningless, prefabricated phrases ("an-opportunity-society-that-helps-families-with-the-daily-problems-they-face"), the interesting thing here is that Mr Blair's offer sounds like of one those you can't refuse. He talks about offering a guarantee of out-of-hours care in school, but his ambition of "an end to latch key kids" will come about only if every parent takes up that offer. It is hard to see that happening without some element of compulsion.

What happened to the idea that parents are the best judges of whether their children are old enough to be left alone for a time or the idea that children might enjoy and benefit from exercising a degree of independence? We live in a society where the parent-child relationship is increasingly seen as problematic while the state-child relationship - mediated through professionals - is seen as uncomplicated and benign.

Education spokesman Phil Willis said the government's plans for "dawn 'til dusk childcare" was an "empty promise" until key details like how the plans would impact on teachers' pay were set out.

Yes, these details will have to be sorted out. But is teachers' pay really the thing we should be talking about on the day that childcare come to the top of the political agenda? The Lib Dems do sometimes give the impression that they are more concerned with the interests of teachers than those of children and parents.

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

There is an interesting article by Chris Bickerton on the Spiked website. He argues:

Ever since France threatened to veto a US-led resolution authorising an attack on Iraq almost two years ago, president Jacques Chirac has used any available opportunity to plug his anti-war credentials ...

With the recent events in the Ivory Coast, however, Chirac's luck in foreign policy may be about to run out. The worsening situation in the former French colony exposes France's hypocrisy: while opposing the US intervention in Iraq, it has few qualms about throwing its own weight around in West Africa ...

For the moment Chirac can still enjoy the best of both worlds: standing up to the USA, and throwing his weight around in Francophone Africa. But if French forces find themselves in direct conflict with the Ivorian army, French militarism in West Africa will stand exposed.

As a good Liberal Democrat I hope to see the European Union develop more of a foreign policy, particularly in view of the current American administration's habit of thinking locally and acting globally.

However, there is a tendency among pro-Europeans to assume that an appeal to our common European identity solves any problem. Bickerton's article is a reminder that fellow Europeans can take very different views of foreign policy questions. Britain, for instance, has not reserved the right to intervene militarily in its former colonies to anything like the same extent. It may be that Britain and France will be able to reconcile their contrasting approaches and endorses a common European policy, but there is no guarantee of this. It is not valid to argue that, deep down, we must want the same thing because we are both Europeans.

Ironically, this naive Europeanism resembles nothing so much as old-fashioned nationalism. It reminds you of the way the SNP constantly appeals to a collectivist Scottish political culture to legitimise its policies. (If you point out that there are plenty of Scots who do not share these values, you are likely to be told that they send their children to English schools and are not proper Scots at all.)

It is not that Jacques Chirac is any less European than I am, it's just that I do not like his policies in Africa.

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

On Saturday 30 October Matthew Fort published an article in the Guardian suggesting some alternative packed lunches for children to take to school.

The following Saturday someone wrote in response. I can't find the letter on the paper's website, and my copy is being recycled by Harborough District Council even as you read this. But, if I recall correctly, it said: "Anyone who brought mushroom risotto to my kids' school would be given a good kicking."

Today the Guardian carries an account of a new report from Barnardo's:

Peer pressure and the threat of bullying are prompting school children to choose highly processed snacks and fast foods over healthy options, a survey of pupils from nursery to secondary school has found.

It goes on to say:

Researchers also discovered that children presented with a picture of a healthy lunch of sandwich, raw carrot, tomato, milk and apple found it impossible to imagine anyone their age choosing to eat the meal. Youngsters suggested it might be eaten by a "posh, sporty girl" who was a "goody-goody teacher's pet" and lived in a big house in London.

All very depressing.

There is nothing new in children being cruel to one another or having immature attitudes. What is new, I think, is the willingness of many adults to indulge these failings or even to exhibit them themselves.

If you think about it for a moment, the letter the Guardian published was appalling. It condones the violent bullying of children for being different from the crowd. It is bad enough that an adult should think of writing it: it is far worse that there was no one at the paper who thought better of publishing it. But its attitude is typical of increasing numbers of middle-class parents who exhibit a sort of embarrassed glee at the awful behaviour of their own children.

As I may well have said on this blog before, I suspect that our current enthusiasm for children's rights arises more from a lack of confidence in ourselves as adults than from any real concern for children.

I have certainly discussed "poshness" before - here and here. But I remain puzzled that young people living in what we are told is an increasingly classless society now seem obsessed with the concept and to regard it as just about the worst sin going.

Nearly half of the species of birds that nest in or routinely visit Europe are in peril, with some so threatened that they may disappear altogether, according to two studies published today. Altogether, 226 species - 43 per cent of Europe's birds - face an uncertain future.

The reason for this threatened disaster? Hidden further down the story than it would be in most other papers, it is the European Common Agricultural Policy.

The paper quotes Mark Avery from the RSPB:

He blamed the declines in Britain on "highly intensive" agricultural practices that cleared the landscape of the hedgerows, coppices and spinneys that offered cover for nesting and feeding birds; that poisoned the thistles, teasels and brambles that provided seeds and berries for winter survival; and that cleared insect pests on which birds would normally feed.

"The great danger is that we will now export intensive agriculture to eastern Europe, destroying their wildlife too," he said.

If you have not grasped the full impact of farming subsidies on the British countryside, read Graham Harvey's bookThe Killing of the Countryside.

And here is a plug for the blog Kick All Agricultural Subsidies - or kickAAS.

A few days ago there was a story in the papers about Islington Council objecting to the Church of England using the word "saint" in the name of a new school it is partly sponsoring. The fullest account was in the Daily Telegraph.

I was interested in the argument used by James Kempton, the Liberal Democrat council's spokesman on children and young people. The Telegraph quotes him as saying:

We need to ensure this is a school which is appropriate for Islington in the 21st century. Church-going is now a much less significant part of people's lives.

It may well be a less significant part of the average Islington Liberal Democrat's life, but that is not true of everyone. When I walk around Leicester I am struck by the number of mosques and temples, many of them recently built. It is clear that religion plays a central part in the lives of many of the minority ethnic communities that characterise the city in the 21st century, and I doubt that Islington is any different.

For all my love of church music and architecture, if you force me to declare my religious position then I am an atheist. But we Western liberal atheists have to accept that, globally, we are in the minority - something which 21st century Britain must surely make clear to us. Nor can we take if for granted that our belief system is the one at which other groups will arrive when they have become more rational or better educated.

Philosophically, my belief is that expressed by John Gray at the start of his bookTwo Faces of Liberalism:

The liberal state originated in a search for modus vivendi. Contemporary liberal regimes are late flowerings of a project of toleration that began in Europe in the sixteenth century. The task we inherit is refashioning liberal toleration so that it can guide the pursuit of modus vivendi in a more plural world.

For a full, if ultimately critical, account of Gray's book see Glen Newey's review in the London Review of Books.

Gray, in more recent works such as Straw Dogs, has rather gone off with the fairies, but his books from the 1990s provide some of the most enlightening explorations of what it means to be a liberal in the modern world.

Saturday, November 06, 2004

"Watch out for a carefully choreographed rift between Downing Street and the White House. A suitable subject will be chosen, most likely the Kyoto accord."

Oborne goes on to say:

carefully briefed articles by sympathetic columnists will soon start to appear disclosing "frosty relations" between Tony Blair and George Bush.

And what do we find Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt reporting in today's Guardian?

Tessa Jowell, the culture secretary and a strong supporter of Tony Blair, will come close to breaching the cabinet's neutrality on the US election this weekend by voicing Labour's "real disappointment" that John Kerry was defeated.

Friday, November 05, 2004

People standing for election to party committees cannot appear in the party newspaper while voting is taking place, so today's issue of Liberal Democrat News is the first I have been able to write in for a while. Here is my first House Points column of the new season.

Stranger but true

Last week BBC2 began to repeat the BBC4 series "Britain's Best Buildings", and the first programme looked at the Palace of Westminster. It was introduced by Dan Cruickshank, who has just the combination of enthusiasm, mild eccentricity and lightly worn learning that makes great television presenters.

He taught us a lot. Notably, that the Commons has a two-sided chamber because MPs originally met in a chapel at Westminster and occupied the choir stalls. They bow to the Speaker's chair because it occupies the place of the altar. When you consider its present incumbent, that makes them a primitive tribe indeed.

But there is a virulent disease that afflicts people who talk about the old pile by the Thames. And Professor Cruickshank had it bad.

You could hear it in his language from the start. He called Westminster "a symbol of a free people, of democratic government and of political continuity". There is something about the place that leads people to make questionable claims in overwrought language. Somewhere at the back of the minds is a desire to sound like Winston Churchill. If Cruickshank's introduction had gone on longer he would undoubtedly have slipped in the phrase "this island race".

And you could see it in the way he walked. If it is possible to caper and fawn at the same time, then Cruickshank did it. As he explored the grander rooms - the Speaker's House, the Queen's Robing Room, the Royal Gallery - he pranced with glee, practically rubbing himself against the plusher fittings, while all the time looking for someone he could bow to.

Cruickshank ended by calling Westminster "a building that is in a very special way a people's palace". It is nothing of the sort. It was built as a royal palace and, though it was substantially rebuilt in the nineteenth century and after the Second World War, that is what in essence it remains.

The latest news is that members of the public will no longer be referred to as "strangers". At the same time the Commons authorities are planning to build a glass screen to cut the Public Gallery off from the chamber.

Very New Labour that. You can get away with the most outrageous actions as long as you have learned to couch them in the right, officially approved language.

Thursday, November 04, 2004

Cheer up. Anatole Kaletsky argues in The Times (you may need to register) that this may have been a good election for the Democrats to lose:

Will the Democrats one day thank John Kerry for losing, just as Labour is grateful to Mr Kinnock? This seems distinctly possible, given the challenges now facing America, especially in geopolitics and macroeconomics. Iraq is a mess which Mr Bush created and it is surely fitting that he should be the one forced to clean it up. The same is true of ballooning government deficits, escalating oil prices and the small but growing, threat of a crisis in the US balance of payments leading to an international run on the dollar.

The Commons health select committee is currently holding an inquiry on this subject. There is a fascinating transcript of evidence from dissident voices here:

Dr Spence: We certainly feel that the industry has a major influence over health care policy and that the influence of the industry is across the board, so it is not just a question of impacting upon doctors and nurses but it is the involvement with patient organisations and with government agencies. The industry is active in all these spheres and has a very clear agenda. Our perspective is that the agenda of the industry, which is predominantly that of profit - and they are responsible to their shareholders - is in some ways in direct conflict with the responsibilities of the NHS.

Tuesday, November 02, 2004

I may moan about the Guardian, but it is amazing what you learn from reading it. For instance, here is something from today:

The Liberal Democrats are to counter Labour jibes that they are "soft on crime" by performing a U-turn over anti-social behaviour measures.

The party accepts that it scored an own goal, and provided opponents with ammunition, when it voted against last year's anti-social behaviour bill on the grounds of its opposition to dispersal orders.

I am not aware that the party has been asked its view. What has happened it that Mark Oaten has changed his mind and announced it to the press.

He says of dispersal orders: "Having gone round the country, I can't, hand on my heart, say these aren't a useful thing."

A politician who is willing to change his mind in the face of the evidence is a rare and precious thing. But the idea that we Liberal Democrats opposed these orders because they were not "useful" is odd. We opposed them, as I understand it, because they gave the authorities too much power over individual citizens.

As Matthew Green toldYoung People Now magazine recently: "Young people have got as much right to stand in groups on a pavement as anyone else has."

Oaten's surprise that dispersal orders are useful reflects a mistaken view that is common among liberals. It holds that we face no hard choices because the most liberal measures will always be the most effective ones too. An example of this is the liberal faith - backed by very little evidence - that more sex education is the way to reduce teenage pregnancies.

I believe that liberal measures often are effective - that's why I am a liberal. But it is nonsense to pretend that we are never faced with dilemmas. If you want some philosophical backing for this idea, look at Isaiah Berlin's work on the incommensurability of values. As this encyclopedia entry says, Berlin argues that:

Liberty can conflict with equality or with public order; mercy with justice; love with impartiality and fairness; social and moral commitment with the disinterested pursuit of truth or beauty (the latter two values, contra Keats, may themselves be incompatible); knowledge with happiness; spontaneity and free-spiritedness with dependability and responsibility. Conflicts of values are "an intrinsic, irremovable part of human life"; the idea of total human fulfillment is a chimera. "These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are"; a world in which such conflicts are resolved is not the world we know or understand.

In any case, the controversy over dispersal orders masks a deeper and more troubling question: why do adults no longer feel able to tell groups of unruly youths to clear off but seek police intervention instead?

Melanie Phillips' diary in the Spectator this week provides a valuable insight into her thinking.

She describes meeting someone in the green room after appearing on the BBC 's Question Time programme. He addressed her as "Mrs Wolfowitz". Phillips observes that:

He has the world-view of the Guardian, Independent and the BBC, which is morally, intellectually and politically unchallengeable. Anyone who doesn't agree with it is by definition beyond the pale.

Yes, liberals and socialists can be remarkably smug and closed-minded - and Nick Cohen has offered a convincing explanation of why this phenomenon affects the BBC in particular:

When conservatives complain about the undoubted liberal bias of the BBC, they assume some kind of socialist plot when it is geography not ideology driving attitudes. A young middle-class BBC type in London is unlikely to meet anyone socially who is, say, against abortion or pro-war. Because they don't confront opposing ideas, they can't put themselves into the minds of people outside their consensus and ask questions from another point of view.

So how does Melanie Phillips react to people who do not share her views? Here she is, in the same diary, talking about the intriguing and important BBC series The Power of Nightmares:

Such a paranoid fantasy would once have been dismissed as the ravings of the kind of person who writes in green ink and capital letters.

If this is an example of the tolerance Phillips extends to ideas which do not accord with her own, "Mrs Wolfowitz" is one of the kinder things she deserves to be called.

Friday, October 29, 2004

The Craven Arms Independent Evangelical Church and Welshpool Independent Baptist Church, which both campaigned against a pagan festival earlier this summer, are worried Bishop's Castle could become a worshipping town for the devil.

With two pubs that brew their own beer, the best second-hand record shop I know and much else to enjoy, it would be a sad loss.